Hon Chairperson, hon Minister, Deputy Minister, ladies and gentlemen, and hon members, good evening. Long before 1955, when the ANC and all the other democrats met in Kliptown, declaring in the Freedom Charter that "The land shall be shared among those who work it!", the ANC insisted from 1912 on that the land that had been taken from our forefathers had to be returned to its rightful owners.
When the Freedom Charter was written, it made the declaration that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white". The Freedom Charter gave rise to an expectation that the new democratic government would create a law or pieces of legislation that would distribute the land.
However, when the dictum was translated into the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, our highest law in the land, nothing was enshrined as a human right for all South Africans; it was not even a socioeconomic right.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have looked through that Constitution. Maybe you have also done so, and maybe you know better than me, but I can see nothing in the South African Constitution that declares land - I am talking about the total surface of South Africa - to be a human right of South Africans. It is not even a socioeconomic right.
People want to use section 25 of the Constitution as a basis for the argument that no person will be deprived of ownership of land. In fact, they are misleading themselves because that clause, if you recall, was created to protect those people who already owned land and property in South Africa. [Applause.] As if it were an afterthought, that section 25 has given rise to some of the restitutions, which do not include the natives of the Western Cape and Northern Cape. Since the early arrival of the settlers in this country, the Khoi and the San in our country were hunted as animals in order for the settlers to take their land. I am sure many people in South Africa know this history and I am not talking about those who are in denial, who believe that black people never existed in the Western Cape before. [Interjections.]
There is no point in arguing this case, because everybody in this country has accepted that there are millions of land-hungry citizens who are poor and unemployed, and who could be working on the land to feed their children.
The real reason why I am putting this on the table is that I really want you to fasten your seatbelts because I am going to tell you what will happen next. [Applause.]